Sailing against the tide
“Educação para todos” (Education for all) is the first book in Portuguese published by Contrarium. Focusing on education in Brazil, the book discusses success stories from Germany, China and the United States in both schools and universities, and how they can be applied to Brazil. It also discusses several important themes such as IQ, research…
The first edition of our literature and art magazine, “Geist”, is just out, and you can read it for free. A multilingual magazine with texts in English and German, Portuguese, French and Italian translated to English, and artworks by several international artists. Poems, short stories, photographs, paintings and illustrations – it’s all there. Please check…
Martin Scorsese has just published an article about Fellini at Harper’s magazine, but which also discusses a bit the current sad state of cinema. Today, he says, everything has become merely indistinct “content”, and the magic of cinema and its artistic auteurs has been lost. I tend to agree. When I was a teenager, I…
The last book release by Contrarium is “Dark Fairy Tales”, a wonderful collection of lesser-known fairy tales. We chose stories that were a bit darker in tone, but not all are tragic and some are humorous too. The volume includes three melancholy and not so well-known stories by Hans Christian Andersen, two darkly humorous stories…
I read this initially about a year ago, and thought it was quite interesting. A bit earlier I had read several of Strindberg’s plays, and also his novel-memoir “The Inferno”, so I was naturally interested in it. Now, I should say that what I read originally was called “Zones of the Spirit”, which was an…
This is the last book I finished, just about a week ago now. It was the first novel I’ve ever read by the German writer Heinrich Boll, who received the Nobel Prize in 1972. I’ve read it in English (an excellent translation by Leila Wennewitz), since my German isn’t worth a Scheiße (pardon my French)….
It took me a while to start reading this book, or rather, this series of four books also called “the Neapolitan tetralogy”. I had heard about it the first time around 2009, of course, when it became a surprising best-seller all over the world. But I was a bit suspicious of it, maybe even a…
When you get to a certain age, which can vary according to the person’s temperament, you start to live more in the past than in the present, if only because you have more years of “past” behind you that you will likely have a “future” in front of you. Of course, being mostly a melancholic…
I am writing a longer article for publication elsewhere about the “four temperaments”, but for now, this brief introduction will have to do. The classic theory, coming from the Greeks, was that there were four basic personal temperaments: choleric, sanguine, melancholic and phlegmatic. They were related to the “four humors”: blood, yellow bile, black bile,…
Still thinking about languages and their differences, I was recently reminded that, while English is a Germanic language, and this is reflected in its structure, about 60% of its vocabulary has Latin origin, mostly through French. So that’s why it feels (to me) much more familiar than, say, German or Norwegian, and why I have…